One common denominator among some of the companies that have had the most success with AI is: female executives

These women-led companies come from all corners of the economy, from aviation and defense to banking and retail. They represent 18% of the AI ​​roster, compared to only women 11% of all Fortune 500 companies in 2025.

The AI ​​use cases deployed by these companies varied widely. Recent efforts by financial giant Citigroup (No. 38) include artificial intelligence Retraining 175 thousand employees About how to write better claims to generate more impactful results from large language model queries. Insurance provider progressive (No. 22) Uses artificial intelligence to help Sorting through hundreds of thousands of job applications. And recently Launched an artificial intelligence tool in Albertsons (No. 30) Can strike up a conversation with consumers shopping online, suggesting grocery items for consideration, which has been shown to raise overall basket size.

Rounding out the list of women-led companies in the AIQ 50 are financial analytics firm S&P Global (No. 12), and aerospace and defense giants. General dynamics (No. 21) and Northrop Grumman (No. 43) Mining Company Freeport-McMoRan (No. 31) and health insurance Two years (No. 27) and Elevance Health (No. 35).

Gail Boudreau, president and CEO of Elevance Health, says her vision for AI is fairly simple and straightforward. “Make health care easier, more affordable, and more personal,” she says.

Some of the generative AI use cases deployed by Elevance Health include tools that make it easier for customer service representatives to retrieve the information they need to answer customer questions. Elevance Health also uses AI to automate transcription summaries of these calls and to look for any issues that may arise during the call. The AI ​​tools then provide advice on how to improve the actor’s future ability to handle similar requests.

“We have AI-powered productivity tools used by more than 60,000 colleagues to help reduce repetitive tasks, so teams can focus more on supporting our members and providers,” Boudreau says.

She also cited the AI ​​certification being offered to employees through the partnership with OpenAI, giving employees formal recognition of their AI fluency, which ranges from basic skills like agile engineering to more advanced AI-enabled work tasks.

Women tend to be “overdependent”, leaning towards past technology trends such as social media, and luck’Company data may indicate that this consumer-driven behavior may be reflected in the company’s environment.

“What you’re seeing is that companies led by female executives are emerging to embrace new technologies that, in some ways, are consistent with some of the consumer adoption behavior we’ve seen in other technologies,” says Larina Yee, director of the McKinsey Global Institute and a senior partner at the consulting firm.

Yee is the founder and lead author of a 10-year McKinsey research project on Women in the workplacewhich found that women make up 29% of executive positions as of 2024, up from 17% in 2015. But progress has been much slower for women in entry-level, director, and vice president positions.

There’s also a mixed picture when looking under the hood of AI racing. Most of the major AI startups building large language models or other systems to drive this technological advance, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks, were overwhelmingly founded by men. Early data shows that women-led AI companies are drawing very little funding from venture capital (although former OpenAI CTO Mira Moratti’s Thinking Machine Lab, which raised $2 billion in July, is a notable exception), reversing the overall trend. Across the entire economy.

Even more encouraging is that women in technology have taken over the CFO role. In OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, alphabetand Sales forceA woman holds the position of CFO.

“Even though the CEO may not be a woman in all of these companies, the CFO has a very powerful role,” Yee says.

At S&P Global, President and CEO Martina Cheung said the company has made incredible progress in improving the skills of its workforce. The internally developed AI assistant, called Spark Assist, debuted last year, and within the first months, 14,000 employees had already used the tool, representing 30% of the workforce. In 2025, this number rises to more than 65% globally.

Externally, S&P Global has also made some of the company’s research available to clients through a subscription through Microsoft Copilot, and separately announced a collaboration with Anthropic to integrate S&P Global’s data sets with Claude. This data is also only available to S&P Global subscribers, and is not part of any of Anthropic’s broader training data.

“This space is moving fast, and we’re moving fast with it,” Cheung says.

Both genders start at the same point when it comes to adopting generative AI, says Sarah Franklin, CEO of AI-powered HR platform Lattice. “There’s no one in this world who has 10 years of experience in AI,” Franklin says. “I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman.”

She points out that business leaders can also learn from past failures. Social media is a form of technology created mostly by men, and it is only years later that studies begin to reveal how much harm it can cause to users, including: Mothers and Teenage girls.

“I think it’s a great opportunity for women to ask the right questions about, how should we responsibly introduce AI into the workforce, into our homes, and into our lives?” Franklin asks. “We don’t want to end up with a bad, miserable outcome.”

Update: This article has been updated to include comments from S&P Global CEO Martina Cheung.

Read more Lessons from the Fortune AIQ 50Latest AIQ Wealth Special report. This collection of stories details how businesses open Fortune IQ50 The list has made significant progress in integrating AI technology into its operations, creating real impact.